The Origins of Glass
During a journey, several millennia before the birth of Christ, a group of Phoenician merchants landed on the sandy banks of the Syrian river of Belo (today Nahar-Halu '). The pleasant prospect of a hot meal prompts travelers to light the fire, to feed it, they use some natron loaves that are part of the cargo of their ships. Great is the wonder when "the ardor of fire", as Pliny the Elder writes in his Natural History, which reports the episode, melts, in addition to natron, the sand of the beach mixed with it, producing a viscous and amorphous material that is never seen before, which, upon cooling, becomes strangely bright in the sunlight. This imaginative version of the birth of glass contains more than one foundation of truth. Natron (i.e. raw sodium carbonate) and sand (containing silica) are truly the classic elements that combined together, in the presence of fire, were used to make glass in antiquity.
And if there is no evidence that it was the Phoenicians who invented glass, it is rather credible that they, as intrepid navigators and traders, were popularizers.
The oldest known glass artifacts are colored beads produced in Syria around, it seemed 3000 BC. C., and other Egyptians, always colored, of some time later. From Syria to Egypt, the art of glassmaking radiates, already before the third century BC, in Greece, India, Russia, Spain. Then it will be Rome to collect and interpret the Middle Eastern experiences in the glass field, producing, in the imperial era, a large number of current-type objects and, alongside them, ornamental artefacts. From Rome and the Italian provinces, glass production extends to Gaul, the Rhine Valley, and England.
In the Middle Ages, European glass production continued mainly inspired by Roman models, but it was the Arabs, especially after the conquest of Persia, who produced better products until the conquest of the Ottoman Empire in 1402 and the occupation of Damascus.
Meanwhile, the scepter of glass art had passed to Venice , dedicated, after the year 1000, to the art of mosaic stained glass in churches. The first news of a master glassmaker in the Serenissima dates back to 1090. According to the documents, it is a certain petrus Flabianicus "fiolero" that is a manufacturer of vials and bottles. In 1255, the chronicles pause to describe the elegant glass artifacts exhibited on the occasion of the coronation of a Doge, Lorenzo Tiepolo. The furnaces were transferred from the city to the nearby island of Murano in this period. Here, around a group of families who have handed down the secrets of the trade from father to son, those experiences in the glass sector mature to which all European competitors will look and draw inspiration. Until the end of the sixteenth century the supremacy in the art of glass belongs to Venice the prestige of the master glassmakers of the Serenissima goes beyond the borders and reaches the various districts of Europe.
Il Vetro Murrino
In the first half of the nineteenth century the Murano glassmakers lived the most difficult period of their production history. One of the strategies implemented to overcome the crisis is the study and rediscovery of ancient techniques, adapting them to the tastes of the time. Among them, the production of Murrino glass, known in Roman times and applied by the Venetians in the 15th century, is revived and updated. It is obtained from the cold juxtaposition of tesserae and / or sections of glass rods of different shapes and colors to form the desired design, then hot compacted with a polychrome mosaic effect. In revisiting this technique, the nineteenth-century masters insert the use of the millefiori cane, formed by concentric layers of glass of different colors, of which the internal ones are star-shaped thanks to the use of special molds. Once the hot layers have been compacted, the barrel is lengthened (in the jargon “pulled”) and then, when cold, cut into cylindrical segments, the murrine, which are incorporated into the old-fashioned objects or even blown with further procedures. If the most significant examples of objects made with this technique are due to Vincenzo Moretti (1835-1901), Giovanni Battista Franchini (1804-1873) invents ever thinner and more complex millefiori canes, with designs different from the traditional star, with which the son Giacomo specializes in the creation of amazing miniaturized portraits, mostly dedicated to famous personalities of the time (Garibaldi, Pope Pius IX, Emperor Franz Joseph, etc.). A virtuosic and very tiring work that tests Giacomo to the point of driving him mad: this is how his father was rewarded in Murano in 1869, as if to compensate him "who owes the almost irreparable loss of a son to the wonderful invention of portraits in cinnamon ..."
